Your federal Government at work. President Obama has enacted part of his promised “Climate Action Plan” today with the creation of regional “Climate Hubs” to coordinate a response to global warming with farmers, ranchers and owners of forest land. This is another executive order by the president without benefit of Congressional

Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack said the seven Regional Hubs for Risk Adaption and Mitigation to Climate Change “are going to do a risk analysis of crop production and of forestry, in terms of changing climates.”

This is, you see, part of Obama’s State of the Union promise “to responsibly cut carbon pollution, slow the effects of climate change and put America on track to a cleaner environment.” Unfortunately there is no such thing as “carbon pollution.” We are carbon-based life forms. Carbon is one of the basic building blocks of life. No carbon — no life. There is not a thing that Mr. Obama can do to “slow the effects of climate change.”

Well, nevermind. They are going to “responsibly” cut carbon pollution. CO2 is a natural fertilizer for plants. It helps plants withstand cold, and many climate scientists believe we are looking at another 20 years of cooling at least. There has been no warming for 17 years.

The problem with Liberals is not that they don’t know anything, but that they know so many things that just aren’t so. The New Yorker: “How Cold Weather Makes You Forget About Global Warming:” Suggests the media needs to “frame the (cold) weather within the context of climate change, emphasizing that it was unnatural.”

“It may come as a surprise to you — it certainly did to me — that 51 percent of the entire land mass of the United States is engaged in either agriculture or forestry. This is a part of our economy that is significant: 16 million people are employed as a result of agriculture, and it represents roughly 5 percent of the gross domestic product,” Vilsack said, adding that the recent severe snow storms and the persistent California drought are a “reflection of the changing weather patterns that will, indeed, impact and affect crop production, livestock production, as well as an expansion of pests and diseases and could compromise agriculture and forestry.”

Well, if we’d start appointing Agriculture Secretaries who have some familiarity with farming, it would help. Vilsack’s qualification was that he had been governor of Iowa. He was also a big backer of the Pigford claimants who fraudulently pretended to be farmers to get enormous amounts of reparations from the government.

Vilsack’s examples of how the new hubs might work would be to identify technologies and practical science-based guidance that will say to farmers — this is how you need to manage, this is what you need to grow, and what seed technology you need. The general direction described doesn’t sound as if this is something the farmers have requested, but simply more Federal busywork. Farmers know a lot more about what they need to do than the Federal government does.

Cleta Mitchell is a prominent Washington attorney who represents several clients victimized by the criminal misconduct of the IRS over the past four years. The president of the United States has claimed that the IRS scandal over agents targeting conservative groups is merely the result of “bone-headed decisions” by a few confused employees. He assured Bill O’Reilly, there is not a “smidgen” of corruption involved in a once-trusted federal agency intimidating the president’s political opponents. But then the rules seem to be somewhat different in Chicago.

There are currently six separate investigations of this scandal underway. Two of them by the Obama administration are classic Chicago scams. Obama cronies tasked with investigating Obama cronies. to show that “there’s nothing to see here, just move along.”

This is the 275th day of the IRS scandal, as documented daily by Tax Law professor Paul Caron. He documents the threat to free speech, the rule changes devised to shut down opposition to Democrats and their policies.

Catherine Engelbrecht and her family run a small oil-field machinery business in Texas. In 2009, after seeing several instances of clear voter fraud as a poll-watcher, Mrs. Engelbrecht founded a couple of conservative political groups:”The King Street Patriots,” and “True The Vote”. In mid 2010, she applied to the IRS for nonprofit status.

Here’s the way that seems to work; At Thursday’s hearing, Jim Jordan (R-OH) asked if their business was ever visited by OSHA in their first 20 years of business? Never, was the response.

Once she filed for nonprofit status, they were visited twice by OSHA. The Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms came twice. The IRS audited several times. The FBI visited 6 times. All just coincidental, of course, though none had visited in the previous 20 years. In Chicago those kinds of intimidating coincidences regularly happen to opponents of the Democrat political machine.

A process of reviewing applications for exempt status had been for decades expected to take three to four weeks was converted to one that took three to four years, and in some cases still is not over.

In spite of, or because, of the six ongoing investigations that mostly seem devised to reach a passive conclusion, Democrats are at greater pains to ensure that the same conservative groups are silenced during the 2014 midterms.

Treasury and the IRS introduced a new rule during the Thanksgiving recess to “improve” the law governing nonprofits. What the rule does is recategorize as “political” all manner of educational activities that 501(c)(4) groups now engage in. This is IRS targeting, by administration design, with the straightforward political goal of putting” tea party groups out of business,” according to House Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp (R-MI). Note that the rule changes target only Tea Party groups, not unions or those who might support the Democrats.

Kim Strassel of the WSJ says that “with one little IRS rule it can shut up hundreds of groups that pose a direct threat”to Democrat prospects “by restricting their ability to speak freely in an election season about spending or ObamaCare or jobs. And it gets away with it by positioning this new targeting as a fix for the first round.”

“The IRS has combed through the list of previously targeted tea party groups, compiling a list of their main activities and then restricting those functions.”

Newly sworn-in IRS Commissioner John Koskinen vowed during his confirmation hearing to restore public trust in the agency, and must now decide whether to aid in a new and blatantly political abuse of IRS powers. The White House is using the agency to win an election this fall.

Don’t like ObamaCare? Unhappy with the president’s policy on Iran? Want growth in the economy? Think there should be more attention to increasing employment opportunities? Information about those policies may be hard to get as Tea Party groups are targeted for intimidation.